Search results

The purpose of this study is to advance the understanding of consumer innovativeness during aging. This study explores why older consumers have decreased innovativeness and how awareness of age-related change affects the adoption of innovation.

A survey was conducted on 200 older consumers aged 50 and older to investigate whether awareness of age-related change influences innovativeness.

The results show that awareness of age-related change causes older consumers to have a decreased tendency to adopt novel products. Moreover, the stereotype threat of older consumers is found to play a mediating role. Older individuals who sense they are negatively viewed as older people restrict their innovativeness to avoid situations that would confirm their incompetence to others. Furthermore, the effects of older consumers’ stereotype threat on innovativeness are moderated by self-monitoring. Older consumers who exhibit high self-monitoring cope with stereotype threat by showing increased innovativeness; however, the opposite effect occurs in older consumers with low self-monitors.

The findings deepen the understanding of older adults’ consumption behavior regarding innovative products and show why people are reluctant to adopt innovative products and services because they grow older by identifying the underlying process that hinders customer innovativeness.

Given the increasing diversity in the age of job seekers worldwide and evidence of perceptions of discrimination and stereotypes of job seekers at both ends of the age continuum, the purpose of this paper is to identify how perceptions of age-related bias are connected to age-related identity management strategies of unemployed job seekers.

Data were collected from 129 unemployed job-seeking adults who were participants in a career placement service. Participants completed paper-and-pencil surveys about their experiences of age-related bias and engagement in age-related identity management strategies during their job searches.

Older job seekers reported greater perceptions of age-related bias in employment settings, and perceptions of bias related to engaging in attempts to counteract stereotypes, mislead or miscue about one's age, and avoid age-related discussions in job searching. Individuals who were less anxious about their job search were less likely to mislead about age or avoid the topic of age, whereas individuals with higher job-search self-efficacy were more likely to acknowledge their age during their job search. Older job seekers higher in emotion control were more likely to acknowledge their age.

Little is known about how job seekers attempt to compensate for or avoid age-related bias. The study provides evidence that younger and older job seekers engage in age-related identity management and that job search competencies relate to engagement in particular strategies.

This paper aims to examine the influence of age and age‐related attitudes on relationship factors. In addition, it seeks to assess how both factors affect care service work performance.

The paper explores the influence of age and age‐related attitudes on the relationship quality among employees, affecting performance in mentally and physically demanding work settings. The authors conducted the research in six residential homes for the elderly in Germany (152 respondents) and collected the data with questionnaires. Data are analyzed by multi‐hierarchical regression analyses.

Results show that age‐related attitudes (intergenerational cooperation and the perception of older employees' capabilities) are important factors influencing the perceived quality level of in‐group cooperation. Both age‐related attitudes and relationship factors influence perceived employee performance, and job satisfaction.

The findings contribute to understanding how age‐related attitudes influence relationships among employees, the relationship between employees and supervisor, and the effect on service performance. The mono‐cultural sample might be a limitation, as well as the composition of the sample: The majority of respondents were female.

For leaders, supervisors and managers the results contribute to understanding how employees' age‐related attitudes, in mentally and physically demanding work settings, influence the quality level of relationships and outcomes. This is relevant in the context of leaders/supervisors promoting followers' individual development and group/team development.

The paper shows that in care service work with an increasing number of older employees, the positive perception of age‐related attitudes influences relationship quality and performance positively.

With age diversity in the workplace becoming increasingly prevalent, the conflict between younger and older workers can be pervasive because of their increased interpersonal tensions from heterogeneous interactions. Adopting an identity-based approach, this study aims to examine the causes, underlying mechanisms and specific strategies used to manage such conflict. It was hypothesized that there is an interaction effect between age-group identification and organizational identification on conflict strategies and that this relationship can be explained by the mediating role of motivational goal orientation.

A total of 380 clerical workers in Hong Kong, aged 19–65, responded to two hypothetical scenarios about conflict with a younger and an older worker using a structured questionnaire on social identity, motivational goal orientation and conflict strategies. Moderated mediation analyzes were performed to test the hypothesized conditional indirect effects.

Results showed that workers who identified with the organization emphasized less on independent goals (with a younger opposing party) and more on cooperative goals (with an older opposing party) when they did not perceive an age-group differentiation, and thus, they were more likely to respond in a way that de-escalates the conflict, including the use of integrating, obliging and compromising strategies.

Extending age-related conflict research beyond identifying generational differences, this study highlights the role of social identity and suggests that employers and managers should strengthen employees’ organizational identification and build a fair work environment that facilitates positive interaction between younger and older workers.

This paper seeks to examine age‐related perceptions of the quality of relationships at work and performance in mentally and physically demanding care service work settings.

The study was conducted in six residential homes for the elderly in Germany. Data of 150 respondents were analyzed using multiple hierarchical regression and mediation tests. The mediating role of relationship quality in the relationship between age and employee performance was examined.

It was found that older employees experienced better exchange relationships with their supervisors, and that this mediated the relationship between age and job satisfaction.

The sample is female dominated. Organizations are in transition from conventional organizational structure to team structure with employees' high company and job tenure.

A higher relationship quality suggests a higher quality of older workers' job appraisal, which might be a starting point for older followers to rethink career perspectives and start further individual development.

The findings extend earlier studies and provide more insight into the relationship between age, relationship quality, and employee performance from a follower's point‐of‐view.

This paper aims to examine the impact of individual and group-level variables on knowledge exchange and identification in age diverse teams. From a diversity perspective, influences of age-related diversity perceptions and diversity beliefs (level 1) are compared with effects of objective age diversity (level 2). From a management perspective, the paper goes beyond age diversity and investigates the incremental effects of team and individual characteristics from a team learning perspective.

Questionnaire data of 516 team members and their supervisors in 73 organizational teams were analyzed in a multilevel approach.

Objective age diversity had a negative effect on knowledge exchange and identification. Beyond that, age-related diversity perceptions and positive diversity beliefs on the individual level predict the effect of objective diversity. Relativizing the impact of diversity, individual characteristics (knowing the team experts, clear understanding of goals) and team characteristics (team climate, time for knowledge exchange) explain the largest proportion of variance in the dependent variables underlining the importance of team learning variables.

Compared to objective diversity, subjective diversity perceptions and diversity beliefs are relevant predictors of processes and attitudes in heterogenic teams.

There are multiple leverages for management strategies beyond the mostly fixed age diversity in teams on the individual and group level.

This paper evaluates the cross-level interplay between objective diversity, perceived subjective diversity and diversity beliefs and revalues the impact of HR-management in age diverse teams.

The age diversity climate construct is gaining greater attention in the organizational literature due to the demographic changes in the workplace. While the few existing studies on age diversity climate (ADC) are rather encouraging, this construct is still at an early stage of conceptual and operational development. This chapter helps to advance this field of research by analyzing the conceptual issues stemming from the theoretical definition and empirical measurement of the ADC construct. We first review and compare ADC with other age-focused climate concepts, highlighting overlapping and diverging factors regarding their conceptual framework and operationalization. Subsequently, we consider several open issues related to the operationalization of ADC, including the level of analysis, the choice of referent, and the dimensions of analysis. We conclude the chapter by outlining possibilities for future research on ADC.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of how portrayals of older employees in mass media messages can help combating stereotypical beliefs on their employability.

The authors conducted a systematic review of empirical studies on mass media portrayals of older employees in order to show what these reveal about the ways in which their employment status, occupation, job type, or work setting is portrayed. The approach builds upon theory on media portrayals, media effects, and stereotypes of older workers’ employability.

This study shows that older employees in media portrayals, when present at all, are relatively often shown in higher-level professional roles, herewith overall, depicting an image that is positive, yet differs from stereotypical beliefs on their employability that are prevalent in working organizations.

Further empirical work is needed to more safely conclude on the prevalence of age-related portrayals of work and employment in mass media. In addition, longitudinal research is called for in order to better understand the possible causes for the way in which older employees are portrayed, as well as effects of age-related stereotyping in mass media and corporate communication outlets over time.

This research sparks ideas about how new portrayals of older employees in mass media and corporate communication outlets can contribute to novel approaches to managing an aging and multi-generational workforce.

This study shows how working organizations can make use of the positive and powerful media portrayals of older employees, in order to activate normal and non-ageist behaviors toward them, and herewith, to increase their life-long employability.

This study highlights the role of media portrayals of older employees in combating stereotypes about their employability.

This study aims to examine the phenomenon of self-perceived age (SPA) identity for Generation X (GenX) women in the UK. Squeezed between the more ubiquitous “boomer” and “millennial” cohorts, and now with both gender and age stigma-related challenges, this study looks to provide insights for understanding this group for marketing.

This study adopts an existential phenomenological approach using a hybrid structured/hermeneutic research design. Data is collected using solicited diary research (SDR) that elicits autoethnographic insights into the lived experiences of GenX women, these in the context of SPA.

For this group, the authors find age a gendered phenomenon represented via seven “age frames”, collectively an “organisation of experience”. Age identity appears not to have unified meaning but is contingent upon individuals and their experiences. These frames then provide further insights into how diarists react to the stigma of gendered ageism.

SDR appeals to participants who like completing diaries and are motivated by the research topic. This limits both diversity of response and sample size, but coincidentally enhances elicitation potential – outweighing, the authors believe, these constraints. The sample comprises UK women only.

This study acknowledges GenX women as socially real, but from an SPA perspective they are heterogeneous, and consequently distributed across many segments. Here, age is a psychographic, not demographic, variable – a subjective rather than chronological condition requiring a nuanced response from marketers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first formal study into how SPA identity is manifested for GenX women. Methodologically, this study uses e-journals/diaries, an approach not yet fully exploited in marketing research.

This paper aimed to investigate how older and younger workers are perceived in terms of Big Five personality and task and contextual performance. Based on the intergroup bias phenomenon, the authors also examined whether respondent age would moderate these effects.

Participants (n=155) completed a paper survey in which they were randomly assigned to rate either a “typical” younger employee or a “typical” older employee. They filled out questionnaires containing measures of perceived personality factors and perceived job performance of an older or younger worker.

As predicted, older and younger workers were perceived differently in terms of certain Big Five personality factors and organizational citizenship behavior. These perceived differences generally reflected actual age-related differences on these variables. However, respondents' age moderated many of these effects, such that respondents' perceptions favored their own age group.

These studies illustrate that dimensions such as perceived Big Five personality and job performance may be useful for examining workplace age stereotypes. They also illustrate that respondent age may affect these perceptions of older and younger workers.

This study goes beyond previous studies focused on the examination of general age bias. Indeed, this is the first study that examines perceptions of personality and performance dimensions of older and younger workers in a field setting. Such perceptions may have an impact on the decisions that managers make regarding older and younger workers (e.g. selection, promotions).